gatsu25 wrote:Can you tell me why that game is region locked, and if your other releases (including this) will be as well?
There are 2 main issues:
1) As Ghegs correctly pointed out, channel conflict: existing Japanese distributors will be undercut by our pricing, particularly with the high yen right now. That can sour relationships between the developers and their domestic distributors, which would be bad.
2) Capcom is handling the Steam releases and, as a major publisher and member of regional age rating organizations, Capcom is obliged to support the age rating systems by applying for an age rating for each game it publishes. If Capcom were to publish through Steam in Japan, they would have to apply for a CERO age rating and this comes at a pretty high cost (thousands of dollars.) Unfortunately, the likelihood of our games achieving enough sales in Japan to recoup the cost of the CERO age rating is pretty low, so that's a pretty clear-cut 'no go' business decision for them.
There is a *slim* possibility that Nyu Media could publish through Steam in Japan & it's a conversation we will have, but it's likely that Valve won't be too keen on complicating things by having two publishers publish the same game in different territories.
In either case, the demand / traffic from Japan is low enough that we can sell directly through the product pages without disrupting existing channels & this is what we've started to do since eXceed.
So, to summarize: there are issues preventing Steam sales in Japan right now, but in the meantime our products can be purchased from Japan from the product homepages.
Hope this helps!
purchase the 45-track album for only $9.99 from http://edelweissjp.bandcamp.com 
Barely acceptable amount :/
